New Publications,
New Music Book Publications - 7th February 2022
Welcome to our latest selection of new music books. Our picks this time round include a collection of essays offering a rethinking of different topics connected with Johann Sebastian Bach; a study of the piano sonatas of Beethoven; an examination of the late music of American composer Elliott Carter; an exploration of the consumption of food and drink in operas; a biography of Russian pianist Maria Yudina; an assessment of music during the Cultural Revolution in China; guidance and tips on how to write a song; an introduction to the links between poetry and song; and an analysis of the representation of Australian Aboriginal music and dance on public stages from 1930 to 1970.
This book gathers a diverse group of contributors to present chapters engaging in an active 'rethinking' of different topics connected with Bach; the iconic name which broadly encompasses the historical individual, the sounds and afterlives of his music, as well as all that those four letters came to stand for in the later popular and scholarly imagination. In turn, it challenges fundamental assumptions about the nineteenth-century Bach revival and about editions of his music as monuments.
Available Format: Book
Ludwig van Beethoven: The Piano Sonatas; History, Notation, Interpretation
Jan Marisse Huizing; Yale University Press; Paperback
This is an in-depth study of Beethoven's piano sonatas using available autographs, first editions, recordings, and nearly three hundred musical examples. Digging into the historical background and historical performance practice, it provides illuminating detail on Beethoven's pianism as well as his characteristics of notation, form and content, types of touch, articulation, beaming, pedal indications, character, rubato, metre, metric constructions, tempo, and metronome marks.
Available Format: Book
The first comprehensive study of the late music of one of the most influential composers of the last half century, this book places Elliott Carter's music from 1995 to 2012 in the broader context of post-war contemporary concert music. It addresses Carter's reception history, his aesthetics, and his harmonic and rhythmic practice, and includes detailed essays on all of Carter's major works after 1995.
Available Format: Book
Feasting and Fasting in Opera: From Renaissance Banquets to the Callas Diet
Pierpaolo Polzonetti; University of Chicago Press; Hardback
This book shows how the consumption of food and drink in opera defines characters' identity and relationships. Moving chronologically from around 1480 to the middle of the nineteenth century, it focuses on questions of comedy, pleasure, embodiment, and indulgence, looking at fasting, poisoning, food disorders, body types, diet, and social, ethnic, and gender identities in operas from Monteverdi to Puccini.
Available Format: Book
Playing with Fire: The Story of Maria Yudina, Pianist in Stalin's Russia
Elizabeth Wilson; Yale University Press; Hardback
The first full biography of Maria Yudina, a legendary pianist who was central to Russian intellectual life. She lived on the fringes of Soviet society and had close friendships with such towering figures as Boris Pasternak, Pavel Florensky, and Mikhail Bakhtin. This biography sets her extraordinary life within the context of her times, where her musical career is measured against the intense intellectual and religious ferment of the post-revolutionary period and the ensuing years of Soviet repression.
Available Format: Book
Music as Mao's Weapon: Remembering the Cultural Revolution
Lei X. Ouyang; University of Illinois Press; Paperback
China's Cultural Revolution produced propaganda music that still stirs unease and, at times, evokes nostalgia. This book uses revolutionary songbooks to untangle the interactions between memory, trauma, and generational imprinting among those who survived the period. Interviews combine with ethnographic fieldwork to explore both the Revolution's effect on those who lived through it as children, and contemporary remembrance of the music created to serve the Maoist regime.
Available Format: Book
There are few artistic acts more mysterious than writing a song. But what if a shift in perspective - and some practical guidance - could overcome that mystery? The idea of becoming a songwriter can seem daunting, but when approached as a focused, self-contained practice, the mystery and fear subsides and it becomes an exciting pursuit. This book brings listeners into this intimate process - lyrics, music and how they come together.
Available Format: Book
Lines and Lyrics: An Introduction to Poetry and Song
Matt BaileyShea; Yale University Press; Hardback
This inventive study of poetry and song draws on literary poetry, rock, rap, musical theatre, and art songs from the Elizabethan period to the present, revealing how every issue in poetry has an important corresponding status in song. Beginning with a discussion of essential features such as diction, metre, and rhyme, it progresses into the realms of lineation, syntax, form, and address, and culminates in an analysis of two complete songs.
Available Format: Book
Offering a rethinking of recent Australian music history, this book presents accounts of Aboriginal music and dance by Aboriginal performers on public stages. It also historicises the practices of non-indigenous composers evoking Aboriginal music in their works, placing this in the context of emerging cultural institutions. Showing the direct relationship between the limits on Aboriginal people's mobility and non-indigenous representations of Aboriginal culture, it seeks to listen to Aboriginal accounts of disruption and continuation of Aboriginal cultural practices.
Available Format: Book
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